I am reading Ann Jones’s new book, They
Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Storyand I am crying, again. I am thinking how military recruiters would like
to destroy copies of this book the way the Pentagon did to Tony Shaffer’s memoir
three years ago – and this is so much more devastating. If you want to see the
military’s carefully orchestrated memes of service and glory melt away like
Nazi Arnold Toht’s eyeballs in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ann Jones, who
I’m calling the Miss Marple of war correspondents (her description, not mine)
does this several times over. Her graphic examination of what really happens
behind all those sterile casualty figures issued by the DoD press office,
is like getting coldcocked in the face. But at this stage, battered and bruised
is better than asleep, which is what most of America has been for the last 13
years. If Jones’s nightmares don’t wake us up, I’m not sure at this point what
would.

Ann Jones

Actor Mark Wahlberg is on a US Navy SEAL admiration tour – at least that is
what Vanity Fair is calling
it. It is more than that, though. With the dedication of a religious devotee,
Wahlberg is promoting his new movie, Lone Survivor, which is, in essence,
a multimillion-dollar military recruitment ad disguising as an action-paced
tribute to the SEALs killed by Taliban fighters in Operation
Red Wings and Operation Red Wings II in Afghanistan in 2005.

Wahlberg is so riddled with (CG) civilian guilt, that he went on a cringe-worthy,
f-bomb-laden diatribe
when it was suggested at a November screening that he had it "rough"
when training with the Seals for the film (he plays the lead character, real-life
lone survivor, Petty Officer Marcus Latrell). Wahlberg seemed particularly determined
to denigrate himself, even apologize for the whole of Tinseltown at the suggestion
that any of them were worthy to even stand on the same stage, much less equate
themselves with the soldiers’ burdens. It is a powerful myth he succumbs to
– that these men are the most virtuous among us because of their extreme physical
prowess and willingness to kill and be killed, "to
provide for us the freedom that quite often most of us take advantage of."

Mark Wahlberg in his new film, “Lone Survivor’

Lone Survivor feeds that of course, offering the familiar "war
is hell" narrative, which begins and ends with heroic blood sacrifice,
the elemental force moving eons of men to war. This, of course, connects all
too well with the 14-year-old recruitment fodder that Wahlberg’s movies usually
target. But no one follows the surviving Seals home, where one could say the
real sacrifices are made – by the veteran, his parents, siblings, girlfriends,
wives and children. Gone is the muscle mass and the boots and guns. In their
place are pill bottles, court appearances and prosthetics.

No big screen heroics there – unless you count the very act of getting up in
the morning and not walking in front of a moving train.

"I was on the way out. I’ve put a gun in my mouth. I’ve felt it in my
mouth," Nathan, a 29-year-old surviving SEAL member of Operation Red Wings
II, told the San
Diego Union Tribune in February. According to the paper, Nathan, who
did not want his full name disclosed, fell into a life-spiral of drinking after
his time in Afghanistan, where he was forced to gather with his hands the remains
of his 11 buddies, now immortalized, and coming to a theater near you.

But Lone Survivor won’t show the Nathans, nor his careful parsing of
brain and flesh from the rocks and sand of the Hindu Kush. It won’t show how
Mortuary Affairs packed his friends’ bodies away, putting parts together as
best they could for the long flight back "home" to Dover. It doesn’t
show Nathan, sleeping on the streets, drunk on booze and the guilt over not
coming back home in a box, too.

Ann Jones, a 76-year old veteran journalist, human rights advocate, professor
and emergency medical technician, sets out to tell the lost part of the story.
What she produces is a staggeringly effective brief, not only against war, but
in support of the soldier and veteran, who despite all the superficial encomia
generated by the American media, is too often left with very little to show
for his or her sacrifice.

"My father used to say that wars are made by men who have never been to
war, men who don’t know that war, once started, never ends," she wrote
of her father, Oscar Trygve Slagsvol, a veteran of World War I, also known as
"the war to end all wars."

"…That war never left his memory or his nightmares," she recalled.
"The violence of war does not end, even when peace is declared. Often it
merely recedes from public to private life."

Jones had spent the better part of the last decade traveling throughout Afghanistan
as an independent journalist concentrating on human rights, mostly of women
and children, incorporating her earlier research on abuse against women. She
worked as an English teacher in Kabul, and wrote about her experiences in Kabul
in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan, in 2006.

She tells Antiwar in a recent interview that she had opposed the war
and hadn’t thought much of the military. It wasn’t until she officially "embedded"
for the first time to do a story about women soldiers, and saw a young male
soldier "just break down" on a forward operating base, that she "realized
that everybody is very close to cracking."

"I saw many others start to crumble before my eyes," she recalled.
"I knew there was another story there."

She acknowledges that her age, and likely her gender, too, allowed her to zoom
in on this dark side of military life and write about it through a clinical
yet compassionate lens. She’s never preachy, but like a grandmother who doesn’t
have a lot of time to mince words, she gets right to the point – a sharp, sharp,
shock to the senses.

"So many of the male reporters who go into the field with these guys,
they’re just wannabe soldiers, and all this military porn is going on … they
never get their story. It’s all glamorous and strategic to them and they ‘turn
off.’ Maybe not intentionally, but it’s like they can’t respond (emotionally),"
she tells Antiwar.

"If you really lose touch with your normal human emotions in that process,
then you are in trouble and what you are reporting is false."

Jones talked to enough soldiers after that to convince her that while she had
been using her pen to tell the story of civilian war victims, the soldiers,
doctors, nurses and civilians servicing the war policy were in their way very
much victims of another kind of abuse: war trauma. And they suffer many of the
same symptoms as those battered women and rape victims she had been studying
for years.

Often, says Jones, they have to heal in the same way, but the military culture
– buck up, medicate – has been slow to recognize it’s creating a generation
of damaged souls. "When I started seeing them as individual people and
seeing them as what was happening to them in this machine they were involved
in, I thought of course, they were as much victims as the Afghan civilians I
had been writing about," Jones said.

She spent a year getting her clearances and was able to travel with the military
on a C-5 cargo plane to Bagram Air Field, the largest US base in Afghanistan,
in 2011. There, she spent time at Craig Joint Theater Hospital (CJTH) and watched
doctors perform miracles on soldiers’ bodies torn apart by IEDs, mostly when
they were on foot patrols.

To this day, the total number of amputations in Afghanistan is elusive – though
this report indicates
no more than 724 as of a year ago. After talking to the doctors at Bagram and
seeing how amputations might be recorded differently (patients can move through
at least three different surgical stations from Afghanistan to Walter Reed from
the time they are injured), Jones believes the actual numbers are higher than
anyone has suspected.

She painstakenly describes how the most advanced medical equipment in the world
was mobilized by the surgeons at CJTH to keep the critically wounded alive and
ready for transfer to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany within a
matter of hours.

From They Were Soldiers:

In the first three months of 2011, Craig Hospital’s 340-person staff received
3,100 patients in that emergency room, including 500 who had suffered severe
traumatic injuries. They did 140,000 lab tests and wrote 60,000 prescriptions.
They performed 1,000 major surgeries—that’s at least eleven surgeries every
day— and witnessed the awarding of 91 Purple Hearts.

The medical staff Jones spoke with at Bagram were on their third or fourth
tour, and bone tired, their faith terribly shaken from seeing what came to be
known as "dismounted complex blast injuries" which we know increased
in 2010 and 2011, tearing into soldiers’ extremities and leaving them unable
to have children, much less sex, for their rest of their lives.

"It’s not a huge number of people," the urological surgeon says,
speaking of the surgeries he has performed himself, "but the severity of
the injuries, and the possibility of complications down the road – that weighs
heavily. The kind of injuries – you don’t have any idea of the devastation
until you see it up close."

Jones has an incredible ability to draw these usually guarded and resolute
military people into her confidence. "I think people would say just about
anything to an old woman," she said, half-joking.

"I ask how (the emergency room nurse) would describe the typical case
she sees in the ER. She replies, "Amputees up to the waist. No arms. No
legs. No genitals. Age 21 or 22. We cry."

"I was startled myself by the response of the medical caregivers in these
emergency situations who were so close to the breaking point and almost everyone
in the field hospital just wept when I was talking to them, they were just falling
apart," she told Antiwar. "I am an EMT myself so I’ve worked
in emergency situations, and I was surprised to what was happening to the doctors."

From there she went on to Landstuhl, where teams of surgeons perform more miracles
and families arrive (they are called over whenever their soldier isn’t expected
to make it). She described in detail one mother whose son rallies unexpectedly.
A "darkly handsome boy," he lost one leg below the knee and another
too high up to ever wear a prosthetic leg. According to the doctor, he lost
one testicle, too, and part of the penis and urethra. The mother accompanies
his elaborate gurney to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC, on a C-17
plane, and is gripping the rails of her son’s bed, tight.

Riding on the flight, too, Jones is beckoned over by an "older Army officer"
who tells her he is going home for "psych reasons" after 26-years
in the service and multiple tours of duty. He has two sons, 21 and 23, in college.

"They won’t have to serve," he says. "Before that happens,
I’ll shoot them myself." I ask if he has any particular reason to dislike
the military so intensely. "War is absurd," he says. "Boys don’t
know any better. But for a grown man to be trapped in stupid wars – it’s embarrassing,
it’s humiliating, it’s absurd."

His words must linger in her mind – "absurd" and "trapped"
most of all – as she continues her horrifying trek to Walter Reed, where she
watches the armless and legless torsos work the only muscles they have left
on gymnasium mats. She observes the pale stoicism of the visiting families,
the fearful but determined faces of the wounded.

"Newspapers carry stories of soldiers cycling and skiing on brand new,
state-of-the-art prosthetic devices, leaving the impression that getting new
legs is as easy as buying a pair of boots" Jones writes. "It’s not."

From there, she travels with a Pentagon colonel, a war veteran, who serves
as a goodwill ambassador of sorts, drumming up support for veterans care organizations
in towns and cities across the country. But like Woody Harrelson in The
Messenger, he is as emotionally broken as any of them. When confronted
with the sad, bloated remnants of a once healthy soldier living in his mother’s
house, nearly paralyzed by medical problems and PTSD, the colonel cannot cope.
It’s as if his own insides are now outside, and are being reflected back to
him. The mother’s claim that the VA has yet to respond to her family’s pleas
for help for "Charlie" doesn’t seem to register. The colonel’s jaw
clenches and he defaults absurdly to his regulation talking points:

"Charlie," he said, "I came here to tell you that none of
this has any impact on your capacity for greatness."…

Then he was on his feet and very quickly out the door… The colonel raced
through the snow toward the vehicle, anxious now to get back in the driver’s
seat. "Jesus," he said. "Jee-zuz!"

They Were Soldiers visits a number of Charlies, some healed, some dead
by their own hands. Once these soldiers become veterans, the cocoon of the military
establishment seems to fall away like their own keen sense of being "warriors"
and "heroes." Now they become cogs in a machine, marching in and out
of VA hospitals, picking up prescriptions, waiting for the next appointment.
Some lash out – Jones is unsparing in her account of the violent crimes committed
by combat veterans – but mostly, they are languishing in some purgatory state.
Wives and mothers, who were told endlessly that they were tending to America’s
best, are now trying to cope with the worst.

Mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch this (They Were Soldiers is published
by Haymarket Books), but that’s
not surprising. It exposes too much for the mainstream, always a dutiful minder
of the sanctioned war narrative, to embrace.

But the Internet is a great equalizer and there is a good chance that Jones’s
book will get play, and likely through the veterans’ networks, which have become
highly charged with anger and determination to set things right.

"I tell my friends they shouldn’t read this book, it’s too depressing,"
she said, again, only half-joking. "I am surprised with the positive reaction
the book is getting. A lot of the comments are coming from soldiers and men.
Which just amazes me. I think I am telling their story."

Lone Survivor actor Taylor Kitsch says
we must all be "pro-soldier" no matter our politics. I think Ann Jones,
in her own way, is as "pro-soldier" as it gets.

201231532324 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fvlahos%2F2013%2F12%2F10%2Fa-book-the-military-wont-want-you-to-read%2FA+Book+the+Military+Won%E2%80%99t+Want+You+To+Read2013-12-11+06%3A00%3A10Kelley+B.+Vlahoshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012315323 to “A Book the Military Won’t Want You To Read”

Kelley has written a good article like she usually does and I haven't yet read Ann Jones' book. But I doubt it will change my basic opinion about these "clowns in green" who are fawned over by the lamestream media ad nauseum 24/7/365, called "heroes" by our military-worshipping culture, etc. etc.

What do these clowns do, exactly? Certainly not defending the country or protecting our frredom. No, they fight wars for Israel and run amok all over the world committing atrocities and murdering people in countries that never attacked us. They are not heroes, they are ZOGbots–in other words, parasites. Hit men and mercenaries trained to KILL on command without question. Does anyone here think they wouldn't have any compunction against turning their weapons on us when the time comes? Absolutely not!

Therefore, I have next zero sympathy for these robotic killers who VOULUNTARILY signed up to serve ZOG and are ordered to make war on the entire world. They deserve whatever fate they get. And to hell with all well-paid Hollywood prostitutes like Mark Wahlberg that glorify this mass-murder and brainwash more naive young people to sign up for it.

Right on the mark. These stories are for those fat bellied windbags that watch Memorial Day marathons that glorify war, and those who will attend memorial services listening to the marital music while sitting on the grass observing the white crosses in military alignment and enjoying the springtime air. But the lawn and the grass hide the bodies that were torn apart and now lie turning to dust. Oh, how they enjoy the parade, but they refuse to see that man sleeping in the doorway, or the one under the newspapers on the park bench, or the man with the squeegee muttering and cleaning the windshield of that fat bellied old man who rolled up his window as her nervously waited for the light to change, and who was on his way to the veteran's cemetery. But, those discarded people were the soldiers not so conveniently buried beneath the earth.

When watching news videos of our soldiers picking their way through Afghan mud huts and farm animals one has to think…what threat does this god forsaken wasteland pose to our freedoms? The US is after all the world's greatest military and economy on earth, which unfortunately does not always equate to military victory..

The stupidity of it all makes Wahlberg's jingoistic comment, as to why our military is still fighting in this made for profit war,…. "to provide for us the freedom that quite often most of us take advantage of" completely nonsensical. And what does he mean by "Quite often?"

Truth is, Afghanistan has never been a threat to our freedom, nor was Iraq, but exposing that fact would stand in the way of pursuing the neocon wet dream of having the US stationed throughout the middle east until our credit runs out.

Interesting that the house is now in the process for approving another $80 billion to be spent in Afghanistan for 2014. all the while cutting food stamps, medicare and research grants. This is what happens when our politicians follow the advice of the warmongers at AIPAC whose sons wouldn't submit themselves to the front lines of Afghanistan for fear of suffering from life long wounds the grunts are made to endure.

Maybe Mark will make a follow up movie showing the suffering found in Ms. Jones' book.

Werner — I understand your anger but I cannot agree with you that all soldiers and veterans should be damned to hell for enlisting in the military. We all know their motivations and personal circumstances are more complex than that. This is not all about "ZOG" but about U.S war & military policy, which sees American men and women and their families as expendable. And believe me, they pay. Read the book.

As a retired Army officer who thankfully made it out alive, I applaud Kelley's attention to these types of stories, sadly under-reported in the MSM. I have already ordered several copies of this book for reading and gifting. Those who forget the past (as they always do) are doomed to repeat it. So thanks for the comments. We must never forget the many lessons of these wars.

[…] Actor Mark Wahlberg is on a U.S. Navy SEAL admiration tour – at least that is what Vanity Fair is calling it. It is more than that, though. With the dedication of a religious devotee, Wahlberg is promoting his new movie, Lone Survivor, which is, in essence, a multimillion-dollar military recruitment ad disguising as an action-paced tribute to the SEALs killed by Taliban fighters in Operation Red Wings and Operation Red Wings II in Afghanistan in 2005. http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/12/10/a-book-the-military-wont-want-you-to-read/#.UqhovOx90U&#8230; […]

[…] reason to keep young men out of the military that might persuade them. In an article titled “A Book the Military Won’t Want You to Read,” Kelley B. Vlahos discusses a new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from […]

Mark Wahlberg, is this a joke? I wonder what he's trying to compensate for? He's gotta be one of the ultimate dim bulb knuckle draggers in Hollywood, and there are many. He promotes mass murder by US occupiers and then he and his handlers profit from it. A class act.

I suspect a free, all expenses paid tour of apartheid Israel is next. Hapless Wahlberg, a clueless, mass murder advocate, and Zionist shill. I wish it wasn't so.

The book is my my (far too long) "to buy & Read List"). A few weeks ago I read David Finkel's book, "Thank You for Your Service," which followed the "after war" of some soldiers with TBI and PTSD after doing a tour during the 2006 "surge" in Baghdad.

In numerous TV interviews young soldiers before,during and after the invasion of Iraq all came out with "we owe it to the 9/11 victims to kick butt over there". They were deadly serious and honestly believed in their "noble mission". When asked to draw a map of Iraq within the Middle East most couldn't or else got it wrong.
Lets hope the book explores the naivety of these soldiers.

As a veteran I thankfully emerged from the war unscathed physically, but whereas I went in a neocon I came out a State-hating anarchist. So many people can easily empathize with a crime victim – a young man murdered for the money in his wallet, a girl raped and pregnant. Yet when you INCREASE this activity by several orders of magnitude, it becomes invisible. This realization is what made me hate and fear the State – not just that it can tacitly support those acts but that it has the ability to give the warmongers cover from the fallout from those crimes.

I went in with a friend at the same time. He was injured in an IED blast. I prefer to remember him how he was than how he is now. Bitter, angry, abusive. He's turned it on his friends and family while religiously trumpeting the accolades of the same State that sent him to die for their power and leaves him to rot. His wife left because of his physical abuse, can't pass urine tests or show up on time for jobs. He's been destroyed. The VA has jerked him around endlessly but explodes if you don't praise the vast bureaucracy in his presence.

These people like Wahlberg can maintain the conquering hero illusion because they don't really know anyone that has personally suffered from the wars. The type of soldier the news media shows is the cases where guys have made peace with their situation, they ignore the guys that came back with no legs, no pecker, and no future.

In my job capacity some years ago, I asked a Marine gunny to look over a map of a section of Afghanistan. He pointed out one area on the map & said, "I was here!" Then he added, "I hope I never have to go back."

W/ regard to the "noble mission," I have heard Marines describe how their "mission" changed w/ each successive tour (3, 4, 5 …). Guess the boys back @the desk were still trying to get it right.

Your hate is showing.The "fight wars for Israel" comment os crap. We don't need Israel as an excuse to send men overseas to blunder around. Israel had nothing to do with Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, the Phillipines, CUba. The list goes on. Most of them signed up,not to serve ZOG, but because they were indoctrinated to think that's what men do. Obviously you're a superior individual who never succumbed to the siren call.

"As a veteran I thankfully emerged from the war unscathed physically, but whereas I went in a neocon I came out a State-hating anarchist."

That was pretty much my reaction when I reached boot camp. I and asked myself "What in the hell did I do?" As time went on my reaction grew stronger. I thought bayonet training was one the most ludicrous activities I had ever participated in. "What's the spirit of the bayonet? To kill!" 19 year old idiot that I was, I decided I wanted to go to Vietnam to see the reality for myself. My First Sergeant, with 3 tours under his belt, vetoed my request for transfer telling me I don't want to do that. After 18 years of active duty he was done with war. On the other hand, my subsequent 1st shirt hated me because I questioned our whole raison d'etre vis a vis Vietnam. I think you're friend is in the same state f denial as the subsequent 1st shirt.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.